Joseph Steinberg (CISSP, ISSAP, ISSMP, CSSLP) is a respected cybersecurity expert, executive, and consultant, who is currently serving as C.E.O. of SecureMySocial, a provider of technology that helps businesses protect themselves from the risks of employee social media usage by warning people if they make potentially problematic posts.
Joseph has spent over twenty years in the information technology industry, most recently serving for nine years as CEO of online authentication vendor, Green Armor Solutions, where he remains Chairman, and in several senior capacities at cybersecurity firm, Whale Communications (acquired by Microsoft), for the five years beforehand.
Joseph is the inventor of multiple information-security technologies; his work is cited in over 100 published patents. He has advised various firms and the government on many high-level matters related to cybersecurity, serves as editor of the official (ISC)2 textbook on info-security management, and has authored, or contributed to, several other cybersecurity related books.
Joseph chaired the Financial Advisory Board for a NJ municipality with combined municipal and education budgets of ~$150M, and, in 2007 was named one of New Jersey’s top businesspeople under the age of forty.

11/08/2012 @ 11:22AM10,394 views

Stop Blaming Hurricane Sandy for Our Own Failings

(Note: This article was embargoed until the author and his family returned home.)

I am writing this on the morning of Sunday, November 4th, as a temporary refugee from my home in Northern New Jersey.

Hurricane Sandy was a horrific natural disaster, and my heart goes out to everyone who is suffering from its aftermath. If we want to prevent future deaths, loss, trauma, and pain, however, we must confront a terrible truth: much of the suffering that people are enduring was both man-made and preventable.

For years, scientists have warned that rising sea levels would ultimately pose a severe threat to lower Manhattan, and that major corrective action was needed to prevent flooding. The risks were publicized on television shows, through charts and animations available on the Internet, and in other media. The New York Times even ran an article on this subject earlier this year. No competent emergency management official could deny knowledge of the problem. Yet, little was done to protect the City from a threat that we knew would ultimately materialize. For what were we waiting – for flooding to actually occur?

Likewise, multiple areas of New Jersey flooded after Hurricane Irene. Not far from me people had to be rescued from their homes in boats. While we did not know exactly where and when flooding would recur, it was obvious that unless major corrective action was taken, it was a matter of “when,” not “if.” We also knew that Irene hit us with relatively weak strength – and that the impact from a mightier storm would likely be far more devastating.

In my own town, in which people are now expected to be without power and heat for quite some time during sub-freezing temperatures, power was cut off for nearly every one of our approximately 40,000 residents by falling trees pulling down wires and utility poles.

We had ample warning. Two town residents were killed by a falling tree in 2010. We suffered two prolonged power failures last year after Hurricane Irene and an October snowstorm, and increasingly frequent shorter outages before then. Crewmembers of the cleanup teams who have arrived from other regions have expressed dismay at the size of trees abutting homes and the pruning done to accommodate sidewalks.

We need to stop ignoring the obvious. While our trees and the canopies they create over our streets are beautiful, in their present form they are also a severe threat to life and property; we must prune where possible, and replace where necessary. Safety comes first.

During the storm and its aftermath, communications also broke down. Government phone and email systems failed, and utilities both provided misleading information regarding power restoration and failed to communicate adequately with government officials and the public, leading to the dissemination of contradictory information from authorities. Confusion reigned, tempers flared, and confidence plummeted.

Aggravating matters locally were asinine, archaic, discriminatory, and probably unconstitutional laws and regulations – including one that required that local hardware stores remain closed on the day before the storm hit; in our area, Sunday is a legally mandated “Day of Rest.” Furthermore, no preconceived plan for automatic or quickly-approved suspension in case of a disaster was in place; even after the magnitude of the devastation and suffering from the storm became clear, it took until Saturday to start the formal legal process needed to suspend these ridiculous regulations (by which point many stores, the majority of which were already crippled, could no longer accommodate opening within a day). The manual process and delayed reaction also meant that any gubernatorial approval of the suspension, as required by law before stores could open, could not come until sometime during the day on Sunday, thereby wasting people’s precious daylight hours.

Sadly, the great City of New York did not perform much better.

One of the cardinal rules of disaster recovery planning is that a plan must be established and tested prior to a disaster, so that people can prepare accordingly, and so that when disaster strikes, everyone follows an explicit script, has clear expectations, knows who needs to do what, when, where, and how, and proceeds in an orderly fashion.

Two days after losing power, my wife took my three young daughters – already traumatized by the storm and by having to abandon their home with no knowledge of when they could return – to relatives in New York City who had power and heat. While my original plan had been to join them shortly thereafter, New York City Mayor Bloomberg suddenly announced that vehicles with under three passengers would not be allowed to enter the City. No script, no pre-storm plan or communications, and no forewarning. While in theory I should still have been able to enter the City via the George Washington Bridge – the one entrance point on which the restrictions had not been placed – a breakdown in government communications (a telltale sign of inadequate planning) caused armed officers to block the roadways from the bridge to Manhattan making entering the City for anyone trying to reunite with his or her family impossible. Would it have been too much for the City to have considered before the storm about how it would handle bridges and tunnels in case of flooding, and to have communicated the possibilities as to what could occur to the public so that they could prepare accordingly?

Speaking of tunnels – why was no plan ever prepared to protect the now incapacitated and damaged Battery Tunnel from Manhattan to Brooklyn from flooding? After Hurricane Irene, and after scientific predictions that even more massive flooding could inundate the area in which the tunnel is located, couldn’t efforts to create closable doors, or a giant plug, or some other solution, have been established and fast-tracked to prevent problems?

We have seen multi-hour long lines for rationed gasoline – so long that cars waiting in line are burning a quantity equal to a significant percentage of the gasoline that their drivers ultimately buy when they reach the front. We must ask ourselves: Was it truly impossible to foresee that without remedial action there would be shortages of gasoline if our ports closed, and gas stations had no electricity to run their pumps – at the same time that tens of thousands of people would be relying on gasoline-powered generators to heat their homes with the outside nighttime temperature dipping into the 20s? Any half-decent disaster recovery plan would have addressed this concern with both preventative measures and a set of orderly procedures to be activated should reactive measures be necessary. Instead, we have authorities shooting from the hip – with no script prepared and shared with the public in advance – sending armed law-enforcement officers to guard gas stations, and enforcing rationing of gasoline with what feels like an ever-changing set of rules. Stations near my home first limited people to $20 of gas at a time, then added restrictions by allowing people to buy $20 of gas only on odd or even dates of the month based on buyers’ license plate numbers, then changed to allow purchases of $40 of gas, but keeping the date rules in place. People were clearly unprepared for these restrictions – especially since nothing about potential limitations were communicated prior to the storm, and, after the storm, communications have been severely compromised. Naturally, corruption and crime ensued: Gas station attendants are being bribed to pump more gas than allowed, parked cars are having their tank locks broken and their gas stolen, and gas tanks are being stolen from people running generators.

On what would have been Halloween eve (October 31st) I saw trick-or-treaters crossing streets with downed wires. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had postponed Halloween due the dangers of the storm’s aftermath, but this particular group never received word. Nothing on the matter was announced before the storm, and there was no publicly-known specific contingency plan for communications.

No contingency plans for voting in our Presidential Election seem to have been in place either; it seems that we are being presented with announcements of changes to the process and procedures daily. Last evening, New Jersey voters were told that ballots will be able to be submitted by email – a process that is untested, seriously susceptible to fraud, and may even lead to our votes being contested in court. Why wasn’t a plan in place – and communicated to voters – before the storm?

Not all eventualities can be anticipated in advance. But, just as with military strategy, that uncertainly does not reduce the need for proper planning and communication prior to a disaster. One can only imagine what would have happened, for example, if the raid on the Bin Laden compound had been executed with a similar lack of planning and communication, and with a “we’ll figure it out when we get there” strategy like the one currently being employed for many matters in New York and New Jersey.

Many people are still suffering from nature’s wrath, and we must help them in every way possible. We must also be extremely grateful to those who have stepped up and performed as true leaders during this crisis. Let us, however, stop blaming God or nature for those pains that were preventable, and which we, collectively, must admit were self-inflicted through our own human failings. Better planning would have prevented much suffering, and freed up additional resources to help our neighbors whose suffering from nature’s fury could not have been avoided. We should learn from our mistakes. It is an unfortunate certainty that eventually another natural disaster will strike our region – the only unknown is how far in the future that day will be. As soon as the cleanup from the current disaster is complete, let us get to work, and put together proper prevention, contingency, continuity, and recovery plans, so that we or our children, or perhaps their children or grandchildren, don’t have to suffer unnecessarily.

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Thanks for this thorough and accurate call to action, Joseph! It does seem our government officials have been reluctant to invest in preventative infrastructure or emergency planning, preferring to play the Russian Roulette of nature. The problem is in part that they fear the costs of such infrastructure are so high and the payoff not guaranteed (i.e. there may not be a disaster during their term, or the next guy in office might get the credit). I wonder if there is a precedent in other states or countries of a kind of peoples movement to pressure government to create emergency planning measures. Seems so obviously part of their role, but as you point out so eloquently, one they have not fully embraced, at great human expense.

The only way to get officials to be pro-active in disaster preparedness is by making the failure to do so a defining electoral issue. In 1979 Chicago was caught unprepared for the major blizzard that hit the city, effectively shutting it down until snow removal equipment was belatedly shipped in from Buffalo. On this issue, Mayor Michael Bilandic lost the subsequent Democratic mayoral primary to Jane Byrne, who succeeded him as mayor. Since then, Chicago has been prepared for winter storms. But only because the mayor was voted out in response to his administration’s lack of preparedness, alerting future administrations to the electoral importance of this issue.